UK: Moolec Science taps into dairy-free category with new offering

  • 7 April 2021
The start-up uses molecular farming and is set to produce alternative dairy and egg proteins
Moolec Sciences uses plants as bioreactors to produce ingredients for food and beverage

Moolec Science is expanding its portfolio of animal-free food solutions with the addition of two products for the alternative dairy and bakery sectors. Leveraging the increasing utilisation of oat protein in food applications, Moolec is creating oat concentrates with co-expressed whey protein. Similarly, ovum protein is being engineered into wheat for an egg replacement designed for the bakery industry.

These products join the meat-analogues that are in Moolec’s pipeline – blends of soybean with selected porcine proteins and pea with bovine proteins.

Moolec is a foodtech company operating from offices in the US, the UK, and Argentina. It came to light in November last year, when it presented to the public its technological platform based on molecular farming, a hybrid approach to plant- and cell-based production technologies for alternative proteins.

“We started exploring the space more than ten years ago,” said Gastón Paladini, co-founder and chief executive. He claims that Moolec was the first team to fully deregulate a molecular farming crop and its functionalised protein concentrate for use in the cheese-making industry. “The product has been successfully used in the manufacturing of thousands of tons of soft and hard cheeses,” he said.

Paladini explained that proteins are responsible for the functionality, mouth experience and many nutritional aspects of food. “The greatest food experiences are mostly those which include high-quality products. And top products only use the best ingredients,” he added.

Moolec seeks to collaborate with CPG food companies to offer the optimal journey and proper affordability for consumers by using its integral animal-free solutions.

“Our selection of dairy and egg proteins will be produced in the host crop,” explained co-founder and chief product officer Henk Hoogenkamp. “We are going to let the plants, the sun and the land work. And after only basic processing, Moolec’s product will have superior nutritional and functional properties for a fraction of the cost.

Hoogenkamp argued Moolec’s wheat and egg protein products will have a higher content of digestible protein and thus, improved nutritional value.

Moolec acquired Sonova, a nutritional oil technology for the production of gamma-linolenic acid. The company said the addition of Sonova complements its bovine chymosin production platform, both of which are based in the safflower crop, resulting in significant efficiencies.